{"id":12645,"date":"2016-06-13T06:47:10","date_gmt":"2016-06-13T12:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=12645"},"modified":"2016-06-26T22:39:05","modified_gmt":"2016-06-27T04:39:05","slug":"montana-ethic-project-a-good-legacy-a-matter-of-choice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/06\/montana-ethic-project-a-good-legacy-a-matter-of-choice\/","title":{"rendered":"Montana Ethic Project: A good legacy a matter of choice"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Yellowtail\"<\/a>

Joey and Libbie Early<\/p>

Bill Yellowtail talks about how we can become “good ancestors.”<\/p><\/div>\n

This is the 15th\u00a0chapter of the 32-part video series \u201cThe Montana Ethic Project.\u201d This chapter features Bill Yellowtail, a former state senator from Wyola, speaking on \u201cFuturing and Native Leadership.\u201d<\/p>\n

You can watch the whole video below. Here is how it begins:<\/p>\n

“We Montanans are a people of a proud heritage.<\/p>\n

“Our cultural heroes, our magnificent landscape, our august statesmen all inspire. But the question for us\u00a0is what will be our legacy?<\/p>\n

“Recently I listened to a bright young American Indian man challenge everyone of use to, ‘be a great\u00a0ancestor.’ That\u2019s a powerful order that will demand we be ever mindful and vigilant about ensuring that\u00a0our descendants, Montanans all, can be as proud of their heritage as we are of ours. That mindset\u00a0requires a dynamic that I want to call ‘futuring.’ That is, we must have and work diligently toward a\u00a0vision of our legacy, your legacy, my legacy, our family\u2019s legacy, and our community\u2019s legacy.”<\/p>\n

Here is another, edited excerpt from Yellowtail’s\u00a0presentation<\/em>:<\/p>\n

“We have to stop defining ourselves by our tragedies and begin developing ourselves by our possibilities.<\/p>\n

“I believe that too many of us Indian peoples have become mired in our tragic history, as if Wounded\u00a0Knee or the Baker Massacre happened to us personally. We even have a name for this dynamic these\u00a0days: historic trauma we call it. Some Indian scholars, in fact, have risen this term to a pseudo-science,\u00a0arguing that this intergenerational trauma is now embedded in our genetic code. Thus, I say, suggesting\u00a0there is little that we can do about it. Now I don\u2019t ever wish to be accused of denying the trauma and\u00a0tragedy that were imposed upon American indigenous peoples, nor that contemporary bigotry is\u00a0excusable in any form, and we must know that many of our ancestors did indeed suffer unspeakable\u00a0traumatizing abuse and forced change. History is fact. I acknowledge that some people, even today, do\u00a0indeed suffer from trauma of various sorts.<\/p>\n

“But I do object to our perpetuating inter-generational trauma by rehearsing it, groveling in it, teaching it.”<\/p>\n